Hundreds of motor voters forced to cast provisional ballots

More than 500 voters in Harris, Bexar, Dallas and Tarrant counties were forced to cast provisional ballots in the presidential elections after their registrations filed at driver's license offices allegedly were not processed as rapidly as required by the state's Motor Voter law, according to state and county officials' ongoing review of complaints from voters across Texas.

In interviews with the Chronicle, officials in the state's four largest urban counties all expressed concern about a small but growing number of motor voter registration gaffes identified by Texans whose provisional ballots will now be belatedly counted.

"I support a review of DPS' (Department of Public Safety) 'motor voter' procedures to clear the air about the popular claim that DPS is frequently failing to enter driver's license applicants' voter registration requests or is somehow dropping entered requests for reporting to the secretary of state," said Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners. "I expect that DPS will be cooperative and diligent in making any necessary changes to ensure that all applicants are registered to vote and so that it's easier to troubleshoot registration errors prior to election day."

The complaining voters represent a fraction of the Texas electorate. This year alone, more than 233,000 new voters successfully registered at DPS offices - about a third of all new voters.

Errors, technical woes

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DPS officials said they will work with election officials to determine whether hundreds of would-be motor voters' election-related complaints were prompted by employee errors, technical problems with transferring electronic records, or other causes, DPS Spokesman Tom Vinger told the Chronicle.

Under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the "Motor Voter Act" as it's commonly known, all states dramatically expanded sites for voter registration to include driver's license offices.

"I am certain that the secretary of state and DPS are working diligently to fix this problem," said State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, who was a sponsor of the law. "If they can't, I trust the Legislature would be more than willing to put protections in place to ensure this doesn't happen again."

In Harris County, 323 would-be voters specifically claimed problems trying to register via DPS when they cast provisional ballots. Of those, 298 had checked the "Yes" box at the DPS showing they wanted to be registered; 25 apparently mistakenly checked the "No" box, county officials said.

Not properly processed

Bexar, Tarrant and Dallas each had about 100 voters whose motor voter applications apparently were not properly processed, though DPS records showed the voters had checked the right boxes to register to vote, county election officials said. In each county, many other voters' provisional ballots were rejected after a review of complaints and documents showed that the voters checked the wrong box on DPS forms or likely got confused while using the state websites for renewing Texas driver's licenses.

DPS officials have processed motor voter registrations for years but previously kept registrations on paper, which were then hand delivered to county election officials. The motor voter registration process was computerized statewide in May 2010, and registrations are now sent daily to the Secretary of State's Office, which then passes them on to county election offices.

DPS spokesman Vinger told the Houston Chronicle he could not immediately supply a statewide tally of the number of people forced to vote provisionally due to motor voter issues. Because of the system's design, each claim has to be researched one at a time he said.

"Without research on each individual case, DPS cannot confirm if a customer began the voter registration process at DPS," Vinger said.

Though that's been a slow process, Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said motor voter registration has vastly improved since the paper system of the 2008 presidential races.

Not all bad news

Callanen said DPS helped her resolve claims received from 356 provisional voters. Thus she was able to confirm that 126 of them had filled out the forms needed to register.

"They're not in the business of registering people to vote - it's like a secondary duty to them," she said. "Yes, this has been a headache but when I step back as an administrator and I look at the workload they have saved for us to be able to import this (data) instead of having processors type in every (registration) card ... I'll take this trade-off."